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If you are serious about communicating clearly and persuasivelythrough your writing, then you must become your best critic. And that involves learning how to edit your work well.

Editing involves word selection, punctuation choices, correct spelling, and paragraph divisions. It also includes your writing’s tone and pace, the validity and effectiveness of your arguments, how your writing is organized, the clarity of your message, and your ability to maintain reader interest throughout.

Self-editing is the hardest part of the writing process, and it may be the most important task you perform. Self-editing corrects errors, prunes unneeded material, replaces decent wording with the best wording, rejects niceties for hard truths, rids lines of cowardice and replaces them with courage, brings clarity where ambiguity lurked, refuses to oversimplify the complex, substitutes passion for boredom … and does all of this to uphold the true, the good, and the beautiful.

I have done this in my own writing, and I have mentored dozens of other writers on how to do this in their work. I want to show you how to edit your own writing. You can learn the essentials for turning an average book into a successful literary gem that will hook readers and keep them returning for more.

What’s the hardest part of editing for you? Leave a comment.

Bill Watkins is the president of Literary Solutions and the senior editor at BroadStreet Publishing Group. A long-time writer, editor, mentor, consultant, teacher, and speaker, Bill is the author of seven books, twenty-five study guides, and about 180 other pieces of writing. He is a Gold Medallion Award winner, and his book The New Absolutes was rated among the “Best of the Best” for 1995–1999 by the Conservative Book Club. He is married and has seven adult children and six grandchildren. He enjoys reading, movies, deep conversations, dating his wife, playing with his grandkids, and teaching every chance he gets.